‘You are not very sympathetic to his age and his health, are you?’ he drawled in return.
‘No, not at all,’ she confirmed. ‘In fact you can take it as a given that I couldn’t care less if he sent you here to tell me had was about to drop dead.’
She turned away to click the switch on the kettle, so she missed the way Anton used the moment to narrow his eyes in grim contemplation of his foe.
‘However, in any other circumstance he wasn’t likely to bother with any message for me, was he?’ she went on as she turned back again in time to watch him lower glossy black eyelashes over his eyes. ‘It’s only that he wants Toby so he can groom him into a chip off the old block more worthy of the Kanellis name than my father was that he’s bothered to send you here at all.’
As he parted his lips to respond to all of that, Zoe watched him change his mind and clip those beautiful lips together again in a way that held her ever so slightly transfixed. How old was he? she wondered. Late twenties, early thirties? Not much more than that.
‘You are very bitter,’ he observed quietly.
‘Look around you,’ Zoe invited. ‘Does this look like the home of a Greek billionaire’s family?’
He did it. He actually dared to stand there in her cluttered kitchen and look around at the pine cupboards, cheap lino and the two mugs sitting on the draining board waiting to be washed. The pure silk of his suit slithered expensively against his long body as he moved.
Then she caught the brief twist his horribly sensual mouth gave and her offended dignity suddenly caught light. ‘If I wipe down a chair would you like to sit down?’
He swung back on her so sharply Zoe almost jumped, then wished she could take the snipe back again when she saw the sudden, hard glint in his eyes. ‘Now, that was uncalled for,’ he rebuked.
‘Well, don’t make remarks about my feelings for a man I have never met or even heard a peep out of in my twenty-two years,’ she threw back. ‘And don’t,’ she added warningly, ‘Even attempt to defend him by telling tales about how badly my father let him down or I will be showing you the door, Mr Pallis—or killing the messenger.’
She couldn’t stop the last bit—it just came out. A tight silence dropped between them. Zoe could not take her eyes off the sudden stillness in control of his face. Her heart had picked up extra beats again and those prickles were making themselves felt as she waited for him to retaliate. When he took a step towards her, she raised her chin up in defiance even as her eyes revealed that she knew that this time she had gone too far with her snipes.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she jerked out as he raised a hand then made her stiffen and drag in a breath as he closed his fingers around her wrist. It was only when he brought up his other hand to carefully prise the knife she hadn’t been aware that she was holding from her fingers that she realised what he was doing.
Maintaining his grip on her wrist, he leant past her to drop the knife back on the counter top. The move brought him close, too close, overwhelming her suddenly with his superior height and the amount of leashed power lurking beneath the suit. Her next breath feathered its way across her throat when she picked up his clean, masculine scent.
‘OK, Miss Kanellis,’ he murmured. ‘Let us take it as a given that we don’t like each other. However, heed my advice when I suggest that you stick to using words to try piercing me with; knives tend to draw blood.’
Her cheeks heated up. ‘I was not intending to—’
‘I meant your blood, Zoe,’ he whispered soberly. He held onto her eyes for a few mind-stinging seconds then let go of her wrist and took a step back.
He really confused her when he relaxed his wide shoulders and offered her a smile—or half of one. ‘I could do with that cup of coffee you offered to make me.’
Flustered by the whole macho demonstration, Zoe stared as he pulled out a chair at the table then lowered himself gracefully into it. Even that had been done as a stab at her insolent manner.
Crushing her lips together, she turned her attention to the kettle and wished the uncomfortable flush would cool from her cheeks. Half of it was there because she was so angry with herself for losing the high ground with her unwitting gesture with the knife; she hadn’t even noticed that she’d picked it up from the breadboard.
Talk about mind transference, she mocked as she poured boiling water onto instant-coffee granules.
‘Do you want milk and sugar?’ she asked him.
‘No thank you, to both.’
‘A biscuit then?’ Never let it be said that her mother had not taught her good manners; she mocked herself yet again.
There was another of those hesitations behind her before he answered, ‘Yes, why not?’
His manners were coming back out for an airing, Zoe recognised as she reached up to open a cupboard and took out a packet of digestives. She knew he didn’t really want the darn biscuit—but two ‘no thank you’s would have made him appear churlish so he’d taken the gracious route.
She placed the two coffees and a plate of biscuits down on the table then sat down on a chair opposite his. Outside the sun was shining in through the kitchen window, casting a sunbeam across the table top. As he picked up his coffee, Zoe watched the sunbeam touch the honey-brown skin of his long fingers as they curled around the mug. Her insides were churning and she knew why. Normally she avoided conflict, would run away from it if she could. Yet here she was intentionally goading Anton Pallis into a row. And really she knew she wasn’t being fair because none of this was his fault.
‘Scapegoat,’ he said, bringing her chin shooting upwards. He sent her a wry kind of look. ‘You need to grind your axe on someone and I happen to be handy. But your fight is not with me, you know. It’s with Theo.’
He really believed that? ‘Tell me,’ she countered. ‘How does it feel to walk in my father’s shoes?’
Right there he had it, Anton noted without allowing himself to react: the reason why she’d shrunk away from him at the front door earlier. Why she hated him so much. She saw his relationship with her grandfather as the sole reason her father had been left out in the cold.
A baby’s demanding cries suddenly impinged on the tension sizzling between them across the table. Perhaps it was good thing, he mused as he watched her rise to her feet. She’d gone pale again, he noticed, was maybe even a little ashamed of herself. Without saying a single word, she walked out of the room.
Left alone, he sat staring into his coffee, not frowning, not doing anything, because in truth he knew that for all its intended insult the stab about her ‘father’s shoes’ held a nucleus of truth. How was he to know what might have happened between Theo and his son if he had not been there to fill the gap left by Leander’s dramatic parting?
In the silence of the untidy kitchen, he sent another curse out to Theo for being so stubborn and making this situation what it now was.
Toby’s room was almost as tiny as the full-sized cot standing in it. But it was as pretty as a picture, all white and pale blue, with splashes of fire-engine red. Zoe had tried to convince her parents to give the baby her larger bedroom because she was away at uni most of the time, but they’d refused, insisting that the room was her room—and anyway this room was the perfect size for a small baby.
A baby they’d yearned twenty years for. Just when they had believed their chances had passed them by, this little angel had been conceived. And Zoe loved him. She loved him so much her heart swelled as she reached into the cot and picked her brother up.
He was wet and he was grizzly but he recognised her voice and opened his eyes when she said softly, ‘No one is taking you away from me, my darling.’
Taking time to change him out of his wet things, she made him comfortable then carried him downstairs. The noise outside seemed to be getting worse and she frowned as she walked down the hallway, wondering what could have excited them all to such a degree.
The reason for the increased noise stood in front of the kitchen window with his back to the r
oom. It must have got round that Anton Pallis was here. All it would take next would be for a helicopter to land in the street and for Theo Kanellis to step out, and the press would feel like all their wildest dreams had come true.
Greek billionaires converge on tiny terrace in Islington! Zoe wrote the headline as she went to collect Toby’s bottle from the fridge.
This billionaire was talking into his mobile phone again. Something really alien curled up her tummy muscles as she looked at him. It wasn’t attraction, exactly, she told herself, though she would be lying if she did not acknowledge he was very good to look at—all height and width and long, lean elegance encapsulated in your typical million-dollar suit.
Dragging her eyes away from him, she listened to him talking in Greek as she busied herself. He was angry about something and when he heard her moving about and glanced around there was an impatient frown on his face. Finishing the telephone conversation abruptly, he rested back against the sink unit, accessed a number in his directory then the phone was back at his ear again.
Zoe stopped listening. Walking round to the sofa, she kicked off her slip-ons and curled herself cross-legged into the corner then bent her head to concentrate on coaxing Toby to accept the bottle teat.
She’d only met the man half an hour ago yet already this scene felt so unnaturally natural, she mused as she stroked Toby’s baby-soft cheek: her sitting here feeding a baby, while he leant against the kitchen sink at the other end of the room, coolly relaying a series of instructions in what sounded remarkably like Russian to her.
A vision of domestic bliss, she mocked it, catching hold of Toby’s waving starfish hand and lowering her head to brush it with a kiss.
He finished his call, and all went quiet in the kitchen. She could hear the wall-clock ticking and soft hum of the fridge. There was tension in the air too, mostly due to the last words she had thrown at him before she’d gone to get Toby, she supposed. She should not have said it, and remorse had been eating away at her ever since. She had no right whatsoever to blame this man for being Theo Kanellis’s substitute son. She might not be sure just how old Anton Pallis was, but it didn’t take many brain cells to work out that he could only have been a child when he’d been put in her father’s place. And her father had always claimed that he’d walked away from that life of his own volition and had never felt the slightest desire to go back to it again.
For a man who had never experienced discomfort in any environment, Anton discovered he was feeling it here in the home of Leander Kanellis. Zoe’s remark about him walking in the other man’s shoes was still cutting deep, he acknowledged.
‘You and your brother could have so much more than this,’ he heard himself utter as one thought led him to another place—the natural negotiator in him, Anton recognised.
Zoe looked up at him over the back of the sofa and caught him indulging in a rueful grimace.
‘And the price?’ she asked out of sheer curiosity.
Attempting to ease some of the tension out of his shoulders without her noticing, Anton strode forward, skirting around the table to come to a halt at the armchair which matched the blue sofa.
‘May I …?’ he requested politely.
She shrugged a narrow shoulder then nodded, and he lowered himself into the chair. It was surprisingly comfortable, he discovered, though he did not relax into it but sat forward to place his forearms on his thighs.
He seemed about to open negotiations by extolling Theo’s virtues; she spoke first. ‘I’m sorry for what I said to you earlier. It was totally unfair.’
‘No, don’t do that.’ Anton frowned and shook his head. ‘Don’t apologise to me for anything you say. You have the absolute right to speak what you believe is the truth. And you know why I’ve come here.’
‘Perhaps you’d better put it in words so there will be no misunderstandings, then.’
It was not a climb down from hostilities which made her offer the invite, and Anton did not take it as one. But at least she was opening a line of discussion he was more comfortable with—business. The business side of their meeting was about to begin.
‘I am here to negotiate terms on which you will agree to hand Theo his grandson. Theo does not mind if you come with the deal, but if you want to return to your studies he’s offering to support you all the way.’
‘Well, thank him for me, but tell him no thank you,’ Zoe returned politely. ‘Toby is my brother and we stick together—here in England.’
‘And if Theo decides to push for custody of his grandson?’
She didn’t even flinch at the suggestion. ‘I am Toby’s legal guardian,’ she stated. ‘And I don’t think Theo Kanellis will risk the bad press by attempting to contest me on that.’
His eyes were intent on her. ‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Absolutely.’ She nodded.
So did Anton, and pressed his lips together and dropped the subject. ‘Theo is not a bad man.’ He tried a different tack. ‘He is tough and he is stubborn, and sometimes he is infuriatingly impossible to deal with, but he is not dishonest or corrupt or cruel to children.’
‘But he couldn’t be bothered to send a representative to his own son’s funeral.’
‘Admit it,’ Anton fired back. ‘You would have despised him for it if he had done.’
‘No-win situation then,’ she acknowledged, and brought his attention to the scrap of a thing she held in her arms when she deprived the boy of his bottle and he let out a protesting squeak.
Lifting him up onto her shoulder, she began gently patting his tiny back. The half-finished bottle of formula rested in the crook of her lap. She looked incredibly young and vulnerable suddenly—they both did—Anton observed and felt like the devil’s messenger come to steal a baby—cold, ruthless and sure of himself.
‘Your grandfather has been very ill and is unable to travel far.’
For a second he thought he detected a flicker of softening in her eyes until she said, ‘Ill for twenty-three years, at a guess.’
He did not pretend to misunderstand her. ‘Your father—’
‘Don’t!’ Suddenly, warning sparks were flying from her electric-blue eyes. ‘Don’t even attempt to heap the blame on my father because I won’t listen! He is not here to defend himself any more which makes that line of negotiation low and cheap.’
‘My apologies,’ Anton said instantly.
‘Not accepted,’ Zoe threw back, still fizzing inside with anger on behalf of her father. The baby let out a whining squeak. Settling the small boy into the crook of her arm again, she retrieved his bottle and offered it to the cherub-like mouth.
Anton watched, momentarily fascinated. He had no experience with babies, or children of any age for that matter, but the one thing he noticed about this baby was that, in every way he could see from here, he was Greek. The head of black hair, the light olive tone to his skin, even the demand for attention, said ‘typical Greek male’ to him.
‘That boy you are holding deserves the best kind of life you can offer him, Zoe.’ Tough though it was, Anton knew from experience that it was the truth. ‘To deprive him of the best because you refuse to forgive your grandfather his sins is unforgivably selfish and wrong.’
‘Why don’t you just shut up and go away?’ She launched at him in shocking full volume, making his soot-black eyelashes flicker in surprise and Toby jerk in her arms.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I hATE you,’ she could not resist whispering before she pulled in a deep tear-thickened breath in an effort to calm herself for the baby’s sake.
‘Because you know I am right,’ Anton persisted. ‘You know you cannot even afford to maintain this roof over your two heads, which will mean you moving into cheaper accommodation. It is a slippery road to destitution and misery, Zoe. A road you don’t have to take.’
His mobile phone started ringing. With soft curse Anton rose to his feet, retrieving the phone from his pocket before striding off back down the kitchen to take the call. I
t was Kostas, his head of security, calling to warn him that trouble was brewing outside the house.
‘The neighbours are out in force, and they are not happy,’ Kostas told him. ‘Their lives have been turned upside down by what’s going on here. They want it to stop.’
Another phone started ringing. Anton turned to watch as Zoe uncurled from the sofa and went to answer it. He watched her face go pale as she listened to whoever it was doing all the talking, and witnessed the slump of her narrow shoulders as if someone had dumped a heavy weight on them.
‘OK, Susie,’ she mumbled. ‘Yes. Thanks for warning me.’ ‘It’s been coming for days, Zoe,’ Susie told her. ‘We can’t even park on our own street. Our doorbells are constantly ringing. They accost us if we dare to step outside. Lucy started crying when we came home this lunchtime because we were jostled as we tried to get into our own house.’
Toby sighed against her shoulder. Zoe felt the tremors of a helpless weariness take control of her legs. Eyes stinging, heart stinging, she tried to think of something reassuring to say but she just didn’t have anything. And in the end she was actually glad when the phone was removed from her trembling fingers by a long-fingered hand.
‘Go and sit down,’ Anton Pallis instructed quietly.
She didn’t even argue. It seemed pointless to try when she was barely managing to stand on her own two feet. Coiling back down on the sofa, she hugged Toby to her shoulder and listened to the deep voice speaking quietly behind her. He sounded like her father again. He was using the same even, mellow tones of a natural mediator.
The tears began to flow. This time she didn’t bother to try and stop them. She’d never felt so miserable or so alone in her entire life. She missed them. She missed her father coming home from working at the local garage and stripping off his grease-stained mechanic’s boiler-suit. No matter how tired he was, his handsome face had always broken into that wonderful, charismatic grin. She missed her mother, her soft, gentle mother—plump because she loved baking—walking down the kitchen and straight into his waiting arms. She missed the warmth, the homeliness and the laughter, the way they’d all squeeze onto the sofa to watch the current reality-TV show and argue constantly over who was the best contestant.
The Kanellis Scandal Page 3